[ih] Cisco origins (Was: when did APRANET -TIPs become known as -TACs)

[Guy Almes]

Noel,
   There are many on this list that were in/about Stanford during the 
mid/late 1980s, so I'll try to be cautious.
   It should first be noted that cisco (originally with no capital C) 
was just Len and Sandy doing whatever consulting/whatever they were 
doing while also working at Stanford.  I believe they had a PDP-10ish 
(TOPS-20?) system at home to use in that consulting work.
   You allude to Len's work supporting systems at Stanford.
   I believe that he (at least eventually) also worked on the routers 
(then usually called gateways) being built as part of the Stanford 
University Network (i.e., SUN) project.  As hardware, the SUN gateway 
was basically identical to the original SUN workstation (both built as 
part of that SUN project).
   The story of how the workstations were "spun off" into Sun 
Microsystems and the gateways were "spun off" into Cisco is complicated 
and worth understanding.
   My first in-person visit to cisco was in early 1987, by which time 
cisco was a handful of people working out of rented space on the 2nd 
floor of an office building in Menlo Park.
   It was so small.  Their "board room" had a table, a few chairs, and a 
map of the world.
   Len had evidently thoroughly received your message about the router 
business being important and he was all in.

   I believe that the original cisco gateway/router was essentially the 
SUN gateway with some additional cisco code.  I suspect that the 
multiprotocol part and the terminal concentrator part came for free with 
the SUN gateway code base.
   While it is true that cisco benefited from that SUN gateway code 
base, it's also true that the cisco folks worked very hard.  Even within 
the IP router functionality, they quickly supported their proprietary 
IGRP along with RIP and the Hello Protocol (from Dave Mills' Fuzzball 
gateway project which was used in the 56-kbps prototype NSFnet backbone).

   Also, do you remember when the visit to Stanford that you described 
here took place?
   For all its messiness, the history of how cisco was in a position to 
produce its routers by 1987 was important to how several of the the 
NSFnet regional networks and other late-1980s Internet components grew.

   Regards,
	-- Guy

On 9/29/25 5:15 AM, Noel Chiappa via Internet-history wrote:
>  
>      > From: Barbara Denny
> 
>      > BTW I am pretty sure Cisco's first product was not a router. I have
>      > seen websites only talk about routers in the history of Cisco.
> 
> This is from memory, so take it with a big grain of salt. (Not iterested in
> researching the point.) But I was very closely associated with these events...
> 
> My memory is that they did, roughly simultaneously, a multi-protocol router
> _and_ a terminal concentrator - in fact, they were more focused on the
> terminal concentrator at the very start. The router was based on prior work
> at Stanford - Bill Yeager's work. I don't know about the Cisco terminal
> concentrator - although I retain a vague memory that it had its roots in
> prior Stanford work too. (I did a Web search for "Cisco terminal
> concentrator origins", but nothing turned up.)
> 
> 
> Amusing (in retrospect) story about this: Yeager's boxes were used _inside_
> Stanford - but they never had ARPANET support. Stanford's first ARPANET
> gateway was - a 'C Gateway' from MIT! So I was out there, sitting in the
> terminal room in Margaret Jacks hall, working on 'Golden' (their C Gateway),
> and in walks Len Bosack - who was then running Stanford's timesharing system
> (a TOPS-20, IIRC).
> 
> We fell to chatting, and I explained to him my insight into why there was
> going to be a _huge_ market for routers (roughly fixed ratio of PC's/routers;
> common projections of how large the PC market was going to be; A+B=$$$.) A
> year or so later, this compny called Cisco appeared.. :-)
> 
> I still have the configuration files for 'Golden'! (The binary loads for it
> had to be created at MIT - at least at the start. I don't know if that ever
> got moved to Stanford.)
> 
> A long time ago, in a universe far, far away...
> 
> 	Noel
> -- 
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